A Yao woman used—sometimes, at any rate, if not always—to go out into the bush a few days before the birth of a child. One or two women would go with her, to put up a little grass shelter and look after her, till they could bring back mother and baby to the village, where, in the case of a first child, they were met with great joy, the grandmother coming out to welcome them and singing, ‘I have got a grandchild, let me rejoice.’ The mother would then go into the special house set apart for her—no one being allowed to enter it except the older women—and stay there for three or six days. If the baby dies during this interval, no mourning is held for it; it has not been formally introduced into the world, and its spirit is not supposed to count, or require propitiating. Perhaps they think it has not really attained to a separate existence of its own. When the time of seclusion is over, the old women shave the mother’s head and also the baby’s, and they are brought out and rejoiced over. The baby is now named by one of the women. I am not sure, however, that the name is always given quite so soon. A Nyanja woman once seemed very much amused when I asked her baby’s name, and said, ‘It has no name—it’s only an infant.’ She was going about with it on her back, so that it must have been more than a few days old if the custom of seclusion had been observed. But perhaps she only thought it unlucky to tell me the name, being a stranger. Children are sometimes called after their father, or other relations, and frequently a person who is no relation ‘may make “friendship” with the babe and give it his own name, or the name of his brother or sister.’ Very often, too, the name is determined by some circumstance connected with the place or time of birth. The father may have been making a canoe (_ngalawa_), and finished it on the day of the child’s birth, so he will name it Ngalawa accordingly. I knew a small boy called Chipululu, ‘the wilderness,’ because, as his mother explained, ‘he was born at the time of the hunger, when the people had to go into the bush to gather food.’ The baby at Pembereka’s was named Donna,[17] in honour of ourselves, as we happened to visit the family on the day when he arrived. His being a boy is nothing to the purpose—there is no such thing as grammatical gender in the Bantu languages, and no one thinks (in Nyanja, at any rate) of making any difference between the names given to girls and boys. In fact, one occasionally finds the same name borne by both. Most names have some obvious meaning—‘Leaves,’ ‘Affliction,’ ‘Wind on the Water,’ ‘It goes,’ ‘We shall see it when we die,’ ‘I have been a Fool,’ ‘Ends of Grass,’ ‘The Day of Beer,’ are a few specimens. But there are others not so easy to make out, and if you ask, people will tell you ‘they are just names—nothing more.’ Probably, unless they are found to be borrowed from another language, these will be old words, obsolete except as proper names.